Tag Palestine and Israel

Net­an­yahu would offer some­thing else. First, he is a faith­ful rep­res­ent­at­ive of an authen­tic “Israeli” view — an almost com­plete dis­trust of Arabs and the chance of reach­ing peace with them, mixed with con­des­cen­sion and dehu­man­iz­a­tion. Second, he will finally arouse the world’s rage towards us, includ­ing that of the new U.S. admin­is­tra­tion. Sadly, this may be the only chance for the kind of dra­matic change that is needed.

It sur­prises me to the degree that many people lose their moral com­pass over Israel. We’ve come to expect it from Israelis; cur­rently they’re prom­ising to pro­tect their war crim­in­als from inter­na­tional pro­sec­u­tion over their recent mas­sacre of Gazans.

But, then there’s people like Mark Thompson, the BBC’s dir­ector gen­eral, who has been instru­mental in the BBC’s recent refusal to broad­cast an appeal for the cit­izens of Gaza. How does one man­age to become so detached from the plight of other human beings? How is it that the per­son who heads the BBC is com­pletely duped by the idi­otic “war on ter­ror” pro­pa­ganda that so dehu­man­ises people like the Palestinians?

An inter­na­tional boy­cott against Israel, not unlike that against Apartheid South Africa, finally looks to be gain­ing traction.

Naomi Klein has made a good case as to why is long past time and reports in Israeli media indic­ate that, since Israel’s recent mas­sacre of 1300 Palestini­ans, the boy­cott is start­ing to have an effect.

If you want to delve more deeply than the head­lines on the issue of Zion­ism and the Palestini­ans a good start is this piece by Avi Shlaim.

Israel has announced that it is near­ing its mil­it­ary goals in Gaza. Given that they seem to have accom­plished noth­ing of mil­it­ary sig­ni­fic­ance in their cam­paign — they have not des­troyed Hamas, and the rock­ets they claim to want to stop (but in fact pro­voked with their inva­sion) are still fall­ing — this raises the obvi­ous ques­tion: what is Israel’s goal?

At this stage, I can’t help but notice that they’ve killed 900 Palestini­ans so far. Which makes me won­der: is a thou­sand dead all they’re after? An object les­son writ­ten in civil­ian blood? Because their mil­it­ary spasm seems utterly point­less otherwise.

Along with the Zion­ist dehu­man­isa­tion of Palestini­ans it would help to explain why Israeli troops her­ded 110 civil­ians into a house under the guise of their own safety before shelling it and killing 30 of them.

The body of a girl who was found in the rubble of her des­troyed house fol­low­ing an Israeli air strike on a house in Zeitoun Pho­to­graph: Mohammed Abed

Oxford pro­fessor of inter­na­tional rela­tions Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never ques­tioned the state’s legit­im­acy. But its mer­ci­less assault on Gaza has led him to dev­ast­at­ing con­clu­sions:

The only way to make sense of Israel’s sense­less war in Gaza is through under­stand­ing the his­tor­ical con­text. Estab­lish­ing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monu­mental injustice to the Palestini­ans. Brit­ish offi­cials bit­terly resen­ted Amer­ican par­tis­an­ship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Trout­beck wrote to the for­eign sec­ret­ary, Ern­est Bevin, that the Amer­ic­ans were respons­ible for the cre­ation of a gang­ster state headed by “an utterly unscru­pu­lous set of lead­ers”. I used to think that this judg­ment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s com­pli­city in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loy­ally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never ques­tioned the legit­im­acy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 bor­ders. What I utterly reject is the Zion­ist colo­nial pro­ject bey­ond the Green Line. The Israeli occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the after­math of the June 1967 war had very little to do with secur­ity and everything to do with ter­rit­orial expan­sion­ism. The aim was to estab­lish Greater Israel through per­man­ent polit­ical, eco­nomic and mil­it­ary con­trol over the Palestinian ter­rit­or­ies. And the res­ult has been one of the most pro­longed and bru­tal mil­it­ary occu­pa­tions of mod­ern times.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has exac­ted the blood­i­est toll of civil­ian lives yet, when the bomb­ing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of hous­ing killed more than 50 people, includ­ing an entire fam­ily of seven young children.

Most of those killed were in the school play­ground and in the street, and the dead and injured lay in pools of blood. Pic­tures on Palestinian TV showed walls heav­ily marked by shrapnel and blood­stains, and shoes and shred­ded clothes scattered on the ground. Win­dows were blown out.

The UN was par­tic­u­larly incensed over tar­get­ing of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with fam­il­ies as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaf­let drops and loud­speak­ers. It said it had iden­ti­fied the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli mil­it­ary and provided GPS coordinates.

Nat­ur­ally the Zion­ist gov­ern­ment says Gazans fired at them from the school. Of course they can lie with impun­ity because they’ve banned journ­al­ists from wit­ness­ing their crimes in Gaza.

Notes:

Yes, not just the Zion­ist gov­ern­ment, but Israelis. Appar­ently 95% of Israelis approve of this assault on Gaza [↩]

The body, known as the National Inform­a­tion Dir­ect­or­ate, was set up eight months ago fol­low­ing recom­mend­a­tions from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with has­bara — mean­ing, in Hebrew, “explan­a­tion”, and refer­ring vari­ously to inform­a­tion, spin, and propaganda.

One of the chal­lenges of Israel’s media offens­ive has been to counter the dis­turb­ing images of Gaza in the con­flict. “In the war of the pic­tures we lose, so you need to cor­rect, explain or bal­ance it in other ways,” said Aviv Shir-On, for­eign min­istry deputy director-general for pub­lic affairs. “Sup­port doesn’t mean the world is stand­ing behind us, but it does mean people under­stand what we are doing and why.

The has­bara dir­ect­ive also liaises over core mes­sages with bod­ies such as friend­ship leagues, Jew­ish com­munit­ies, blog­gers and back­ers using online net­works. Last week the dir­ect­or­ate star­ted a You­Tube chan­nel show­ing Israeli bomb­ings in the Gaza strip. “New media is a new war zone within the media — we are plan­ning to be rel­ev­ant there,” said Leibovich.

It’s deplor­able the num­ber of people, mostly so-called “lib­er­als,” who choose to keep their mouths shut in the face of the scourge that is Zion­ism, some­thing Ron­nie Kas­rils, a South African politi­cian who was act­ive in the fight against apartheid from the 60’s onwards, described as “far worse” than apartheid South Africa.

Ima­gine what these same people would be say­ing, or doing, if their own coun­try had been unlaw­fully occu­pied and embar­goed for 60 years of relent­less oppres­sion and repres­sion, and all attempts at peace­ful change had been force­fully pre­ven­ted or scuttled.

And yet they don’t stay silent because they think Zion­ism is a just cause, surely; it’s clearly not. They stay silent because of 9/11 and the sub­sequent con­fla­tion of any Arab oppos­i­tion to West­ern dom­in­ance as ter­ror­ism. They stay silent because of the Jew­ish Holo­caust — some­thing the Arabs had noth­ing to do with — because they’re too scared of been tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism.